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Comment by kar5pt | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have recommendations to get off of Gmail? I've tried in the past, but I get so much junk mail that not having gmail's auto-categorizing makes my email unusable.

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This topic is discussed regularly on HN. Popular alternatives are Fastmail and protonmail (surprisingly not Outlook). I use Fastmail. I won’t touch protonmail. Their claims about privacy and encryption are mostly false and if they deceive about that, what else are they deceiving about?

Fastmail has been around for ages, much longer than protonmail, even longer than Gmail, and is completely no-nonsense. Good apps and a good web interface.

Also:

“Fastmail developers are among active contributors to the widely used Cyrus IMAP open source software project and include the lead developer and maintainer of Perl module Mail::IMAPTalk. Fastmail supported the development of the free software webmail interface Roundcube and developed JMAP – a new open email protocol.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail

But fastmail is based in Australia, which means they can't be trusted for privacy/encryption following the The Assistance and Access Act/Anti-Encryption act.

https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...

Encrypted email just isn’t a thing. The minute you send a message to someone else it’s out in the wild.

This. Get over it. Your email is not private or anonymous and never will be. Once you accept that, ProtonMail's value proposition is meaningless. ProtonMail must answer to subpoenas by handing over stored emails and IP addresses, just like everyone else. Here's one example:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...

You're saying that Swiss-based Protonmail is worse for privacy than Australian-based (remember Australia's horrible digital privacy laws?) Fastmail? I'd love to see if you can even slightly substantiate that claim. Fastmail, by OZ law can legally be forced to allow snooping on its users without even telling them, while Protonmail has actually fought hard to stop snooping even in edge cases, yet you say you "won't touch" them? Some specific reason?

> You're saying that Swiss-based Protonmail is worse for privacy than Australian-based fastmail?

I'm claiming that neither of them are good for privacy. As a sibling wrote so well: "encrypted email just isn’t a thing. The minute you send a message to someone else it’s out in the wild."

I have zero interest in my email being encrypted or protected or anonymous. So ProtonMail's value proposition is meaningless to me. But the fact that ProtonMail masquerades and markets their email as private and encrypted is the problem. They're subject to subpoenas, just like everyone else, and if they are going to market their service as private, encrypted, or anonymous, then they are misleading at best and lying at worst:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/05/how-protonmail-lost-th...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/comment/e...

Lots of other interesting dirt if you do some basic google searches.

So I chose Fastmail because of their honesty. I know what I'm getting. Their prices are great, apps are great, web interface is great. They've been around since 1999 -- longer than Gmail. I used their free tier first then moved to paid with a custom name some time ago. Clearly they're not going anywhere. I'm not sure what else you can ask for in an email provider?

> Their claims about privacy and encryption are mostly false

First time I've heard this, can you expand on it?

There are a number of recommendations at https://www.privacyguides.org/email/

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no issues. Fastmail seems to be a very popular option here.

It's likely that a lot of these will probably lack certain features Gmail has such as auto-categorising emails (partially due to the fact that they are not in the business of scanning your emails in the first place). I'm not sure if there are open-source tools to replace those features.

Personally, my approach would be to focus on reducing the junk mail. Moving to a new email address would give you a clean slate, at least. You can also look into AnonAddy or SimpleLogin to help prevent spam in future.

You can start with your own domain and forward to your gmail. Do regular takeouts and you are then effectively using gmail as a reader and can dump it when needed (or if they dump you it will be less painful!)

The other problem is that self-hosted email is far more likely to go to spam. I have some accounts set up with gmail only because otherwise they will never get delivered.

I'm content with a tiny service called posteo from Berlin, Germany. It's a euro per month and it offers email and calendars with a lot of focus on security.

Fastmail seems to filter spam for me fine.

I do different usernames@same.domain to make filtering into folder/labels easier too.

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